Here I introduce the text’s main argument, that the web of networks between African and creole runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color built through rituals and marronnage was a key aspect to building the racial solidarity that made the Haitian Revolution successful. The theoretical framework for this comes from my attempts to bridge thoughts from Sociology and African Diaspora Studies, more specifically using insights from scholarship on the Black Radical Tradition to correct and contribute to the sociology of collective consciousness, social movements, and revolutions.

With these words, Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis described May 13, 1888, the day that ended legalized slavery in his country. Brazil was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery; it had also been the largest and the most enduring slave society in the Americas. For more than 350 years, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century until abolition, slavery shaped Brazilian history across nearly every region of its continental geography. Over those centuries, nearly five million enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil, more than 45 percent of the total number of persons forcibly brought to the Americas. In the years that followed that sunny May 13 of abolition, Machado de Assis himself would be witness to the brevity of its joy and to the immense challenges of Brazilian freedom. The scale of those challenges was such that, a scant decade after abolition, Machado de Assis’ friend Joaquim Nabuco would write: “Slavery will long remain Brazil’s defining national feature.” Well over a century later, the power of those words persists: slavery and its legacies remain Brazil’s most formative elements.

This chapter provides a reinterpretation of Modesto Brocos’ well-known painting, Redenção de Cã. Its goal is to resituate the notorious canvas within the complex transitions from bondage to freedom that began in the 1870s and lingered through the 1910s. It argues that Redenção is a painting just as much about a black nineteenth-century emancipationist past as it is about a whitened twentieth-century post-emancipation future. This argument calls into question previous interpretations that have been reluctant to interrogate what is to be made of the Black characters in the canvas and how Brocos – whose contact with Afro-Brazilians began in the 1870s, during his student years, and intensified after 1890 – drew from direct contact with the formerly enslaved to paint his enigmatic portrait of bondage redeemed.

This chapter discusses how slave traffickers adapted to the new circumstances created by Brazil’s 1831 ban on the transatlantic slave trade. While the ban by no means prevented further slave trafficking, it did force significant changes. In Pernambuco, the fourth most important destination for enslaved Africans in the Americas, traders could still reap abundant profits if they were willing to use small ships, pack them with the compact bodies of children and adolescents, and forge active partnerships with the complicit plantation owners who controlled the coast, roads, and towns surrounding Brazil’s natural harbors. In encouraging these new and brutal economic logics, the 1831 ban deeply impacted both the social demographics of Pernambucan slavery and the political and economic networks that structured the province.